Battle Hymn: Crownsville, 1871–2021

Monifa Love is a Professor in the Department of Language, Literature, and Cultural Studies and Associate Dean in the College of Arts and Sciences at Bowie State University. She earned her doctorate in English from Florida State University, where she studied as a McKnight Doctoral Fellow and as an associate of the great philosopher and oppression theorist William R. Jones. She earned her bachelor’s degree with honors from Princeton University in anthropology. Love is the author of two collections of poetry, Provisions and Dreaming Underground (Naomi Long Madgett Award winner). She co-authored two fine arts catalogs about the life and work of Ed Love. She produced ….my magic pours secret libations, a fine arts catalog and video of an exhibition she curated of African American and Afro-Cuban women artists. She is the co-author of Romancing Harlem, a cultural memoir of Harlem written with Charles Mills. Additionally, Love co-authored “Deep-Rooted Cane: Consanguinity, Writing, and Genre” with writer Evans D. Hopkins, who is the inspiration for the character of David Carmichael in Love’s award-winning novel Freedom in the Dismal. She is the founder of Home Base Women, a women’s poetry chorus. Her work can be found in numerous reference books, textbooks, and journals. She co-edited and wrote the introduction to Speculations on Black Life: The Collected Essays of William R. Jones (Bloomsbury, 2023). Love has participated in two NEH Fellowships: African Cinema (Dakar, Senegal, 2005) and Black Poetry after the Black Arts Movement (University of Kansas, 2015). She lives in Maryland with her spouse, and they work on development projects in Ghana.